Thicker Than Water
by Clever Lass
Summary: Lecter comes home and hears Starling crying in the bathroom. What are the long-term ramifications of her unexpected discovery? Oneshot.


_All characters except Sinclair are the intellectual property of Thomas Harris._

_I wrote this in response to all the Lecter fics about him and Clarice having children, and what good parents they are, and all. It bugged me, because he's a sociopath and she's an FBI agent with no maternal instinct. You can't tell me that they would be happy about the idea of procreating! So this is the way I picture things would work out if they did._

**Thicker Than Water**

Clarice Starling sat on the toilet, sweating. She had just urinated on a pink stick of plastic that had the power to change her life.

Three years after Chesapeake, she still sometimes felt like she was in a dream world when she awoke every morning to see that neat grey head on the pillow next to hers. She had to remind herself that she was an FBI agent no longer, that she was indeed sharing the bed -- and the life -- of a sociopathic serial killer.

She had accepted her decision long ago, though, and until just a few days ago had been comfortable with it. Then, when her period didn't come, she started to wonder... then to worry.

She sighed and looked at her watch. One more minute. She didn't even want to think about what might happen if the test were positive. She took another long, shaky breath trying to calm herself before she looked at the test. It was most likely negative anyway, she told herself. Lots of women on the Pill were a week late and they were fine. Didn't mean a thing.

Biting her lip, she checked her watch again. Thirty seconds.

She didn't even want to think about telling Hannibal.

Finally, it was time. She closed her eyes briefly, then took a breath and turned over the stick. Two pink lines showed in the window. Starling let out her breath in one explosive sob, then found she couldn't stop crying.

Hannibal Lecter pulled his car into the garage and unloaded the groceries from the boot. Clarice wasn't in the kitchen, so he went ahead and put away the groceries before looking for her.

She wasn't in the library either, nor in the living room. He cocked his head, listening, and then he could hear her in the bathroom, crying.

"Damn," he murmured softly but with heartfelt emphasis, then sighed and went back to the kitchen.

Dinner was quiet. Starling spent most of it in a reverie, responding in monosyllables to Lecter's desultory comments about traffic and the weather. They both fell silent. After dinner, Starling made the coffee and brought it into the living room as usual. She filled their cups, then joined Lecter on the couch. She was miserable.

Lecter inhaled the scent of her misery, noticing absently that it had soured a bit over the last few years. He no longer liked her unhappy. Gently he touched her hand. "What is wrong, Clarice?"

His voice was like a waterfall of quicksilver, smooth and flowing but with a faintly metallic edge. Starling had always been attracted to his voice, but had other things on her mind tonight.

"I can't tell you yet," she finally decided to say, not meeting his intense gaze.

"Didn't we agree to be honest with each other?" he pressed.

"We also agreed to allow each other some privacy," she shot back. He didn't change expression, and she held the tension for a moment and then sighed. "Listen, I promise I'll talk about it soon, but I'm not quite ready to do it tonight."

Ordinarily Lecter would be satisfied with this, not wanting to be rude, but tonight was different. Her pensive mood irritated him, and he already knew what the problem was anyway. It would be better for both of them if she opened up. He grasped her jaw and turned her face toward him so she'd have to meet his eyes. "That's not good enough tonight, Clarice. No. You'll tell me now."

Her eyes dropped. "Later, Hannibal. Please," she requested.

He pretended to give in, releasing her jaw and taking her hand. He pressed a kiss to her knuckles. "All right, then. But may I guess?"

She assented. She was a little afraid of where his guesses might take them, but was curious.

He leaned back, smiling. "Let's see. After three years, I've begun to bore you and you want to go home and see if the Institution will take you back."

Starling chuckled in spite of herself. Smiling, she shook her head. Bored with him? Ha!

He winked at her, then steepled his fingers and continued. "No? Well then, it must be that someone was rude to you in the market yesterday. Who was it, Clarice? Tell me his name and we won't have to buy a roast for Sunday."

Still smiling, Starling shook her head. "Doctor, maybe it's just as well you're no longer in private practice. You've just struck out twice -- maybe you're losing your touch."

"Am I?" he smiled, leaning forward to press a kiss to her lips, but stopped a hair's-breadth away. "Well then, try this: your test was positive, and you're afraid of how I might react to the news."

Starling's smile sagged from her face and Lecter leaned back again, the kiss unfinished. "I should have known you'd guess," she said bitterly. She looked up sharply. "How did you -- "

He stroked her hair, once, and said, "In three years, your cycle hasn't deviated once from its 29 day pattern until now. Yesterday you snuck out to the pharmacy, and tonight I came in to hear you crying in the bathroom."

"Are you angry?" Starling asked in a low voice.

He looked surprised. "Why on earth would I be angry, my dear? I'm assuming I'm just as much responsible for the fact as you are."

Her lips twitched. "You're only assuming? Don't you know for sure if it was you?"

Lecter shot her a withering glance that made her grin, and sipped his coffee. Totally ignoring her playful question, he cleared his throat and said sternly, "Now, to get on with more important matters: have you any idea what we might do about it?"

Starling, warmed by his use of the word "we," began to relax just a little. "Well, I figure the three options would be to keep it, abort it, or have it adopted," she said slowly. She picked up her own coffee cup and fiddled with the handle, giving Lecter a sideways glance from under her lashes. "I don't suppose you have a preference? After all, you're just as responsible as I am."

Lecter cocked his head. In all the thought he had given the matter, he had only been thinking of what Clarice might do, how Clarice might handle it. His mouth tightened in a rare feeling of embarrassment when he realized that he had been purposely thinking about Clarice in order to avoid thinking about it in terms of himself. Now she was asking him what he, as biological father to this new life, wanted her to do with it.

"I can't say," he admitted finally. It was a humbling realization that here was one outcome for which he had never planned. "What are your thoughts?"

Starling considered her answer carefully before she spoke, not wanting it to sound wrong to him. "Well, our lifestyle isn't exactly conducive to good child care," she said. She took a sip of coffee and continued, "And frankly, the idea of being a mother scares the living piss out of me."

Lecter chuckled. "Vulgar but accurate, Clarice. I can't really disagree for my own part, either."

Starling got a sudden image of Lecter, with his hyper-acute sense of smell, trying to change a baby's diaper, and she snorted out coffee into her napkin.

Lecter's eyebrows lifted. "Must have been good," he said expectantly.

"I just tried to picture you changing a diaper," she explained, still smiling broadly.

His eyebrows rose higher and his face took on a decidedly pained expression. "Quite," he agreed.

Starling enjoyed the joke for another few seconds, along with the expression on Lecter's face, before they got back to the matter at hand. "So I think we're both agreed that we aren't exactly parent material?" she asked, relieved.

"I think it is safe to say that," he replied, similarly relieved.

"So, the next question is -- adopt or abort?" she said. She turned his question back on him. "What are your thoughts? I'm assuming that since you already knew the problem, you've been having a lot of thoughts."

"I usually do," he assured her. "I have thoughts all the time." He smiled charmingly when she glared at him, then took a breath. "While I haven't exactly been keeping up with modern obstetrics, I do know that childbirth is generally safer than pregnancy termination. I would be the last one to wish you nine months of morning sickness and misery, but I would also hate to lose you to a ham-handed surgeon who wasn't thorough enough and caused an infection."

"Can't you deliver a baby?" Starling asked, mildly surprised. "I thought you could do anything."

" 'I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies,' " he replied with such a close approximation of Butterfly McQueen's delivery that Starling laughed out loud. Pleased at having lightened the atmosphere and cheered her up, he smiled unapologetically.

"It's true," he continued after she calmed down. "I never did that well with my obstetrics training. It's a long and boring story, but the upshot is that I was never very good at delivering a baby."

She snorted. "_You_ weren't? How about me!" She considered his earlier statement for a moment, then said, "So let me get this straight: you could care less about the child, as long as I'm safe."

"That is the essential fact, yes," Lecter said.

"So the fact that this child is a combination of your genes and mine, not to mention a 'product of our love'... " she quoted from a cheesy TV commercial they'd had the misfortune to see, "...means nothing to you?"

"Exactly." At her look of puzzled surprise, he shrugged. "My dear, I _am_ a sociopath. I frequently don't feel the same way about things as the majority of humankind does."

Starling shrugged. In a way, that made it easier. Then a thought struck her. "Oh, my God. What if our child turns out to be a serial killer too?"

"Then I hope he doesn't ever meet a young and ambitious FBI agent and have to spend his life incarcerated," he replied, unconcerned. He smiled and leaned over to claim that unfinished kiss.

Lecter was unconcerned, but Starling was worried. She put off her decision for a week, while she did some research on the net and through phone calls. No one could give her a straight answer on whether there was a genetic element in sociopathy or not. She sighed, wishing she had someone else to talk to than Lecter. Someone uninvolved.

She missed Ardelia.

Once the thought struck her, it wouldn't leave. Every day she would spend a little time working out what she might say if she saw her friend again after all this time. Finally, she mentioned it to Lecter.

He was concerned. "Clarice, how well do you know her loyalties? When you knew her, was she your friend first, or an FBI agent first?"

"FBI agent," Starling admitted. "I know you're right about that, but what I want your help with is trying to figure out a way I can talk with her but not give her a chance to report anything."

"Or, perhaps, not give her anything to report," Lecter spoke absently, already thinking. Starling smiled. She positively loved to watch him work.

In another few days, their story was worked out and Ardelia had been found. She had married, Starling discovered, and was living in Silver Spring, a suburb of Baltimore. No children. Kept her own name. Still a successful agent.

Starling felt a pang of envy at that. Ardelia had always known how to play the office politics game, and Starling herself had never managed to catch on. She stifled the feeling, reflecting that she'd been places that Ardelia had probably never seen, had done things that Ardelia had probably never imagined, and had done them all with the one man who knew and understood her better than anyone else ever had -- and who loved her anyway. She hoped Ardelia's marriage was at least a healthy fraction as good as her own.

Not wanting to be traced to their home, Starling and Lecter flew to Mexico to make the telephone call. Lecter warned his wife, "If my name comes up, remember not to react. If she says terrible things about me, do _not_ defend me; it will merely arouse her suspicions."

"It would probably arouse her suspicions if I didn't defend you at least a little," Starling admitted. "After all, I always have." Lecter was touched. He smiled and left the hotel so she could make her call in private.

"Ardelia? Is that you? It's Clarice." Starling held the telephone away from her ear, to avoid being deafened by Ardelia's shriek of astonished joy.

"Clarice! You're alive! Oh, girl, you don't know how glad I am to hear your voice!"

"I'm pretty glad to hear yours, too," Starling admitted. She couldn't seem to wipe the grin off her face. She hadn't realized she had missed Ardelia this much!

"So where have you been all this time, hon?" There was a sharpness to Ardelia's tone as she slipped from being best-friend to being FBI agent.

"Here and there," Starling said. She paused a moment for effect, and then said, "Ardelia, can I talk to you? I really need a friend right now, not just an agent pumping me for info."

"Are you all right?" Ardelia asked instantly. "What happened? What about -- _him_?" After the Jame Gumb incident, Ardelia never referred to Lecter by name.

Starling took a deep breath and started acting. "He got bored a few months ago, and took off. I have no idea where he is right now." That last part, at least was the truth. She thought he was probably drinking coffee in the cafe down the street, but didn't know for sure. "He kept me long enough to make sure I'd never be able to go home again and then he left me in Mexico.

"But that's all behind me now. I need help, Ardelia. I have a problem and I don't know how to handle it. Please, can I trust you not to report me? I honestly don't know where he is."

Starling heard her friend weighing it over in her mind. Finally deciding to believe her friend, she said, "All right, Clarice. What's up?"

Starling said, "Well, I hadn't been with anyone else since then, but a couple of months ago I met this guy. He was an American, he was from Baltimore, and it was just so good to hear a voice from home. We went out a few times and really hit it off, but now -- Ardelia, now I'm pregnant and he's gone and I don't know what to do or where to go for help. He's gone, and I don't have any friends here. I just needed someone to talk to."

Ardelia made an inarticulate noise.

"Ardelia?" Starling said. "Are you okay?" There were more unidentifiable noises, until Starling finally realized that her friend was crying. "Ardelia, honey, what's wrong? Listen, can you calm down and tell me what the trouble is?"

The other woman sniffed loudly and said in a wavering voice, "Listen, Clarice, can you call me back in a half hour? I don't want to know your number, but I just need a few minutes. OK?"

"Sure thing, hon. Talk to you soon." Starling replaced the receiver on the phone and frowned.

Half an hour later, Ardelia's phone rang again and she picked it up. "Clarice?" she said cautiously.

"Yeah, it's me again. Are you all right?"

Ardelia nodded. "Yeah, I'm better now. Sorry about that."

"Want to tell me about it?" Starling offered, feeling slightly guilty that she had unloaded her problems without first finding out how her friend was doing.

"Well, it's just that -- Clarice, I want a baby. Chuck and I have been trying to have one for three years, and nothing. Turns out I have permanant cysts on my ovaries, and can't produce any eggs. We've been trying to adopt one for the last year, but the agency keeps putting us off and jacking the price. Now it's up to $45,000 for a domestic adoption and it's about a 6 year wait. It's just -- when I heard you were pregnant without even trying, when we've been wanting a baby for so long, it sorta pushed me over the edge."

Starling's jaw dropped. She knew her friend had always wanted children, but had had no idea how badly. The thought struck her immediately that this might be a solution to both of their problems. "Have you tried adopting privately?" she asked, testing the waters.

"Yeah, but no luck yet. There are so many people out there, Clarice, who are just as desperate to have a baby as I am. But hey, enough about me. What are you going to do with yours?" she asked curiously. Her mind was working along the same lines as Starling's, but she didn't want to presume. Clarice would probably want to keep her baby. Any woman would.

Starling snorted. "Well, let's see... I'm hiding from the FBI, I'm broke, I'm unemployed, I'm pregnant, and I'm stuck in a rat-infested boardinghouse that's not exactly in Acapulco." She looked around at their gorgeous five-star hotel room in Acapulco, and grinned. "The only thing I have to offer a child is that I can speak Spanish now. The thing is, I can't decide whether to have it or not. My doctor says that childbirth is safer than abortion, but I know I can't keep it in either case."

Starling heard Ardelia catch her breath and judged the time was now right to make the suggestion. "It's a pity you couldn't adopt it for me, Ardelia," she said. "I would love to think of my best friend raising my child when I couldn't."

"Clarice, are you serious?" Ardelia asked in a strained voice. "Honey, I would love to adopt your baby, but are you sure you can't keep it?"

Starling took a breath. "Yeah. I'm sure. But we can't do that. I mean, how are you going to organize a private adoption from a suspected felon? Plus there's the health care. I'm in Mexico, for God's sake."

"Let me worry about that, Clarice." Ardelia's voice had a positive lilt in it, that Starling smiled to hear. "Let me talk to Chuck tonight. Listen, do you want to leave me your number? I'm not gonna report you, don't worry. Not after this!"

"No. I can't, I'm sorry."

"Okay then, call me back tomorrow if you can. We'll work something out. I promise!" Ardelia hung up the phone, singing.

Starling hung up her own line and slid off the bed. Time for lunch. She got her hat and bag and wandered down to the café on the ground floor of the hotel. Sure enough, there was Hannibal. She joined him with a smile.

"And how is Miss Mapp doing these days?" he asked her, pouring a cup of coffee and handing it to her.

"Quite well, except for one thing," Starling told him. She took a sip of coffee and closed her eyes in pleasure. Opening them slowly, she set the cup down and met Lecter's gaze straight-on. "She and her husband cannot seem to have a baby. They are looking for a domestic adoption now, but cannot afford the rates or the wait."

"Indeed?" Lecter asked, intrigued. "Might she be interested in an international adoption instead, do you think? If money were no object, I mean?"

"'Honey, I would love to adopt your baby!' pretty much summed up her feelings on it, I thought," Starling quoted. "She wants me to ring her again in the morning to work out some details."

"Seems as if this might solve all our problems, then," Lecter said with satisfaction. He smiled at an amusing thought.

"Yes?" Starling asked expectantly.

"I was just hoping the child doesn't come out looking like me in any way," he said. "And that he or she does not choose to go into a law-enforcement field that requires DNA testing at any point. That might strain your friendship with Miss Mapp, if she discovers that she and her husband are bringing up the spawn of the Cannibal."

"Then we'll have to do our best to make sure she doesn't find out."

_Twenty-two years later…_

"Hannibal, did you see this?" Starling gestured toward her computer screen. He bent close—his eyesight was beginning to play tricks on him—and read the headline.

"This year's graduates celebrate their achievement at Quantico." The picture showed a few young people wearing black gowns and big smiles, and showing off their badges for the camera.

Starling pointed toward an inset, which showed a full-color photograph of a dark-haired young man with clear blue eyes, exchanging beaming smiles with a dignified-looking black woman. The caption next to this one read, "Special Agent Sinclair Mapp accepts the congratulations of his mother Ardelia Mapp, head of Behavioral Sciences."

"Indeed," Lecter remarked, fighting the urge to laugh. "It looks as if he's following in his mother's footsteps after all!"

"Which mother, though?" Starling teased.

"Does it matter?"

"I guess not. I'm just glad he's not following in his father's footsteps!" Starling signed off the computer and stood up, stretching.

"Oh?" Lecter asked suspiciously.

Starling looked at him very innocently. "Absolutely. Didn't I tell you Ardelia's husband had been sent to jail for molesting little girls?"

"Ah!" Lecter nodded. "Yes. Exactly where he belongs, the swine."

Starling shook her head. Her husband was full of apparent contradictions: he had no problem with killing and eating someone who was rude to him, but had a zero tolerance policy for child molesters.

"It strikes me, Clarice, that this is quite an accomplishment for young Sinclair," Lecter mused.

"It is, yes," Starling agreed warily.

"I think we should send our son a graduation gift. Don't you?" Lecter asked.

"Such as?"

"Oh, a car, perhaps. That's traditional for such occasions, I believe. Possibly a new wardrobe, to keep him from being dressed like a G-man. They always wear such cheap suits." He slanted a look over to his wife. "Or maybe the opportunity to meet his birth parents?"

Starling shook her head. "Uh-uh. No way. We gave him to Ardelia and that was that. No more involvement. We agreed!"

"Yes. We agreed not to interfere or try to reclaim him as a child. He is over twenty-one now, and not a child."

"No! We agreed that we'd leave him alone. That we'd forget we even _had_ a child."

"Have you forgotten?" he asked seriously. He nodded at her crestfallen expression. "Neither have I."

Two days later, a couple of aging expatriates in Argentina bought tickets to Washington, D.C. Their seatmate was a single young woman who smiled at the older couple as the plane took off. "So, what brings you to the nation's capital?" she asked.

"We have been abroad for many years," the man replied. "It will be good to be home again."

"Oh, do you live in D.C?" the young woman wanted to know.

The older lady gave her a tired smile. Her hair was long and red, but beginning to silver. "No," she responded quietly. "But we have family there."

END

_This will not be continued, but please review anyway. I know it's a bit of an odd story: it was written in two sittings, about two years apart. It was hard to find my original voice again, but I hope it didn't come outtoo bad in spite of that._


End file.
